U.S. MAGAZINES GET NEW BIG GUY

There are, as nearly as I can tell, three Big Guys in present-day American magazine journalism, as distinct from newspapering. They are James Fallows, Michael Kinsley and, now, Andrew Sullivan.

Fallows is 49, Kinsley 48, Sullivan 35.

Each served for a time as editor of a highly visible magazine--U.S. News and World Report (Fallows), The New Republic (Kinsley and Sullivan), Slate (Kinsley)--for an intellectual/financial impresario: the Washington Monthly's Charles Peters, The New Republic's Martin Peretz and Mortimer Zuckerman, owner of Atlantic Monthly and U.S. News.

Each has written widely, taking sufficiently strong positions on a wide array of leading issues of the day. It also happens that each of the three has made a splash by taking a strong position on global business' favorite magazine, the London Economist.

It was in 1988 that Kinsley quit his job as editor of The New Republic to edit from London the magazine's American Survey--a few pages near the front of the book each week. "An export item, like Crabtree and Evelyn soap," he later described it. "Americans buy it because they assume it is an important institution in Britain.

Writing in The Washington Post three years later, the famously dirigiste Fallows asserted that The Economist "unwholesomely purveys smarty-pants English attitudes on our shores." It had become a sacred cow among America's professional class by asserting its preference for markets over management in a tart English accent, he said.

Its circulation was 40,000 when Ronald Reagan took office. Today its American circulation tops 300,000, and earlier this month Andrew Sullivan wrote in The New Republic that "Apart from Austin Powers, there can be few British institutions as groovy right now as The Economist."

Yet the closer you look at the magazine, according to Sullivan, the more ordinary it seems.

The Economist is drifting, he wrote. Its American Survey is out of touch and unoriginal, its coverage of business and finance overshadowed by the more original reporting of others, its market intelligence lacking and its world historical compass spinning.

The Economist has been publishing for 156 years, and by any standard, it is among the most successful of all magazines.

It rode to its current prominence in the '70s and '80s on the strength of four broad insights: that the world was not running out of oil, that the command economies of the Soviet Union and China were falling behind, that among the industrial democracies America was in the van, and that Japan was not going to take over the world.

Sullivan offered two reasons why "the paper" (as its staffers know it) may find itself adrift. The first reason boils down to too much Magdalen. The Oxford college certainly has produced a huge proportion of current staffers. The editor, his deputy and the New York bureau chief are graduates, as were three of the four runners-up for the top job. So is Andrew Sullivan.

Such clannishness is fine for producing a distinctive voice, he says, but it's not much on generating necessary negative feedback.

Precisely because some members of each new cohort want to be what their predecessors were not, there is a kind of self-correcting cycle built into organizations of this sort, sufficient to provide renewal over a relatively short period of time. Meanwhile, The Economist remains the world's business weekly, regardless of its editors' blind spots.

Closer to the mark is Sullivan's second explanation of the funk, that perhaps The Economist is another victim of the peace. "Until the 1990s, it had a definite role in promoting the free-market revolution, pioneering such concepts as deregulation, privatization and globalization. But then the Cold War ended. "With the end of such an ideology, the magazine has wandered," he writes.

Has the era of market liberalism in fact ended? That's where Sullivan comes in. Until recently, he was best known as a writer on gay issues. But a remarkable piece on American conservatism in The New York Times Sunday Magazine at exactly the right moment last autumn--"Going Down Screaming"--drove home Sullivan's reputation as a political analyst. He has become the newest of the Big Guys. His decent, conservative, Catholic views, which routinely go far beyond the measuring rod of money, illuminate the temper of his times.